9/11/09

President Barack Obama speaks to a joint session of Congress on health care at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on September 9, 2009. Obama is right: We do have a health care system that is unsustainable in the long term, and it comes up short compared to European systems.

The most moving part of President Barack Obama's powerful speech Wednesday night was undoubtedly the letter from which he read, sent to him from "our beloved friend and colleague" Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had asked, back in May when he wrote it, that the letter should not be opened until after his death. As Obama reported, Kennedy "expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform—'that great unfinished business of our society,' he called it—would finally pass," and in doing so, define "the character of our country." Indeed, it is amazing that while Kennedy served for more than four decades in the Senate and dedicated much of his energy and superb legislative skills to the passage of just such a program, the problem has only gotten worse over time.